The Let-Them-Eat-Cake Moment

It’s probably a bad thing that Pam and I are both home, watching CNN.

The latest stunning drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average has us both upset (her more than me, I think). Now, we’re in that ‘Can’t look away from this car crash’ mode.

This morning, we saw the head of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, testifying to Congress. They brought up a slide, detailing the nearly 1/2 billion that he made in the last 7 years or so in salary, stock options, and who knows what else. Later, they showed helicopter flyovers of 3 of his homes in Florida, Colorado and California, as well as his $22 million Manhattan penthouse. I kep thinking of the line “It’s good to be the King”, said by Mel Brooks when he’s playing Louis XVI in ‘History of the World, Part 1″.

However, it was another Frenchman (or Frenchwoman) who came to mind a bit later in the broadcast. Wolff Blitzer had a call into Donald Trump. He asked the multi-billion dollar business magnate, socialite, television personality and John McCain supporter what Americans can do at this point. “Dream”, he said, “Dream of when things will get better.” He also spoke of how well he was doing, having closed a deal selling several properties to ‘The Russians’ and chuckled with Blitzer over the fact that he got his money before their market tanked as well. Earlier in the morning, I saw this comic, thanks to Darren Barefoot.

Marie Antoinette could not have put it better, Monsieur Trump.

Celebrating the Smoot

According to Google’s built-in calculator functions, I’m 1.04477612 smoots tall. And what, you may be asking, is a smoot?

From Wikipedia:

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), an MIT fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

One smoot is equal to his height (five feet and seven inches ~1.70 m), and the bridge’s length was measured to be 364.4 smoots (620.1 m) plus or minus one ear, with the “plus or minus” intended to express uncertainty of measurement. Over the years the “or minus” portion has gone astray in many citations, including the commemorative plaque at the site itself. Smoot repeatedly lay down on the bridge, let his companions mark his new position in chalk or paint, and then got up again. Eventually, he tired from all this exercise and was thereafter carried by the fraternity brothers to each new position. Everyone walking across the bridge today sees painted markings indicating how many smoots there are from where the sidewalk begins on the Boston river bank. The marks are repainted each year by the incoming associate member class (similar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha

This past weekend, smoots and Oliver Smoot were back in the news:

Father of the ‘Smoot’ returns to MIT

By Associated Press | Saturday, October 4, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage

CAMBRIDGE – The father of a unique measurement known as the “Smoot” has returned to MIT.

Oliver Smoot was the shortest pledge in the school’s Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity 50 years ago when they decided to lay him on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge.
They found he measured 5-foot-7 inches, then marked the bridge every five feet and seven inches, determining it was 364.4 “Smoots” long. Today, Google’s calculator function will change any measurement into Smoots.

The original Smoot — who later became chairman of the American National Standards Institute — returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Saturday for “Smoot Celebration Day.” Smoot spoke and was presented with a plaque, which will be installed on the bridge.

MIT president Susan Hockfield said the plaque will brighten the day for windblown pedestrians.

I love the fact that Smoot became chairman of the American National Standards Institute. Who better to preside over such an organization than someone who is a Standard of Measure himself!

On the half a dozen or so times that I walked on the Mass Ave. bridge, I surveyed the Smoot marks like the one in the picture above, and was intrigued by the effect of a half a century of repainting (the repainting wasn’t always in the same colour!) I heard stories about the Boston police describing the location of disabled vehicles on the bridge being ‘near the 200-smoot mark’ or  ‘at the 250th smoot’. In fact, given how useful the smoot marks were, I wonder if it might be a good idea to also mark Vancouver’s bridges of significant length (such as the Granville Bridge, here in Vancouver)  in smoots. I’ll bet it would help with traffic reports. We could even append some smoot information at the bottom (as a footnote) of those flags already on the bridges. While the Burrard Street Bridge is probably not long enough to warrant ’smoot calibration’, the Cambie and Lions’ Gate bridges could certainly benefit from this measurement. Even if we got pressure from the folks in Boston that only the Mass Ave. bridge could have smoot marks (because they were a bona-fide tourist attraction), I’d counter that there is no such thing as a copyright or other rights on a unit of measurement.

Perhaps some day in the distant future, people will wonder why all bridges are measured in smoots, and probably assume that it had something to do with road construction or the elevation of bridges above water. After all, measurements often have strange histories. The original definition of the inch was the width of a man’s thumb. In the 14th century, King Edward II of England ruled that 1 inch was equal to 3 grains of barley placed lengthwise, end to end.